Assad’s Pitch for Anti-ISIS Pact with West Falls Flat
Ian Black of the Guardian reports that Bashar al-Assad “would like nothing better than to be embraced by the West as an indispensable partner in a new “war on terror” – now the focus of intense talks following advances by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq and the beheading of two American journalists. It doesn’t look as if that is going to happen.
“Assad’s argument since the start of the conflict in 2011 has been that he is a bulwark of stability, the only barrier to an al-Qaida takeover. Syrian state media, focusing on Gulf funding, has portrayed all his enemies as fanatical jihadis even when demonstrations were largely peaceful.
“At the same time, the authorities freed Islamist prisoners to bolster the official narrative and divide opposition ranks. The Syrian military refrained from attacking ISIS, especially in its Raqqa stronghold in the northeast, until after the fall of the Iraqi city of Mosul in June. It also intervened to help ISIS fight other rebel brigades.”
U.S. Says Syria May Have Hidden Chemical Arms
Rock Gladstone of the New York Times reports that the U.S. has expressed concern that Syria’s government “might be harboring undeclared chemical weapons, hidden from the internationally led operation to purge them over the past year, and that Islamist militant extremists now ensconced in that country could possibly seize control of them.”
The assertions were made by Samantha Power, ambassador to the United Nations and current president of the Security Council. Gladstone writes that Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations official appointed last year to coordinate the destruction of Assad’s chemical cache, told reporters that Syria had yet to address what she described as “some discrepancies or questions” about whether it had accounted for all of its chemical weapons.
Twenty-five Dollars Buys an Illegal Crossing on Turkish Border With Syria
Mehul Strivastava and Selcan Hacaoglu of Bloomberg News report on whether Turkey’s clampdown on its once-open border with Syria has cut down on smuggling – and barred extremists from crossing.
“As international condemnation of the murders draws renewed attention to this porous crossing point for Western passport-holding fighters, Turkey has stepped up patrols, added highway checkpoints and erected new fencing,” they write.
“It hasn’t worked, according to interviews with refugees, injured fighters recuperating in Turkish hospitals and with the smugglers who have long operated a black market ferrying people back and forth. As late as this week, illegal trips that skirted the Turkish controls were both simple and numerous.
The price: $25, with assurances that large amounts of equipment could be taken across with zero chance of inspection, according to three men who offered their services as traffickers. That’s up from about $10 a person before Turkish authorities cracked down on border security.”